Pelé reflects on a lifetime of world fame

He's almost universally acknowledged as the greatest footballer to ever play the game, but the legacy Pelé leaves will be mixed, writes Nick O'Malley.

When Pelé limps into the function room at the Santos Football Club, an ecstatic pandemonium erupts. The crowd of about 150 leap to their feet as one and scream. The men - they are mostly men - keep looking to him, then back to one another, as if to reassure themselves that this moment is actually happening. Some weep - a common reaction, I am to learn. Then the chanting starts, a celebration of Pelé's record 1281 goals: "Mil gols! Mil gols! So Pelé! So Pelé! Maradona cheirador!" ("A thousand goals! A thousand goals! Only Pelé! Only Pelé! Maradona sniffs cocaine!")

You can't escape Pelé's presence anywhere in Brazil, but in Santos, an hour from the seething mega city of São Paulo, he is ubiquitous. Though he owns property around the world, he still lives in a compound on the outskirts and his loyalty is readily returned. His likeness is on the walls of the stadium and in bronze out the front. Framed portraits cover the walls of the little barber's shop across the road where he still gets his hair trimmed every fortnight. It is inked on the arms of a bloke nicknamed "the German", who runs the bar next door. It is in shop windows and on advertising billboards. The historic town hall, gutted by fire some years ago, has been turned into the Pelé Museum, two wings of three floors, part theme park, part reliquary.

In the pandemonium, Pelé is Zen-like. He is engaged and endlessly gracious but unruffled. When order is restored he takes the stage and tells some stories. Each of them has been told thousands of times before and over the years they have warped and changed with repeated retelling, but the people still like to hear them and Pelé tells them well.

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Beautiful game: Pelé is a three-time World Cup winner who can still draw a crowd anywhere in the world.Credit:Clive Brunskill/Contour by Getty Images

Later, sitting in front of his old locker - sealed and said to contain artefacts from his playing days - Pelé talks to Good Weekend, and as he moves towards the door he signs more autographs for club staff who have managed to slip into the room. Nobody is turned away and everyone gets a warm, smooth, two-handed shake and a photo.

It takes him half an hour to move 30 paces even here, protected by staff and locked doors. One of his management team, who had flown in the day before from a holiday in Paris and is about to fly out to New York, gives up trying to coax Pelé out the door and makes a run for a taxi, leaving him to her two subordinates and his own personal assistant.

Despite his ease amid the chaos and worship, and despite the joy he seems to draw from the joy he casts about, he looks tired and you can't help wondering why he is still doing this. He has nothing to prove.

He is almost universally regarded as the greatest footballer to take the field. Depending on your interpretation, he either invented modern sporting celebrity or it invented him as its first product. But recently, his continued presence on the public stage has done more to tarnish his reputation than enhance it.

Star and stripes: Pelé playing for the New York Cosmos in 1976.Credit:Corbis

He moves gingerly after a hip replacement in 2012. He has just turned 74, and though his face is still readily broken by that deep triangle of a smile, he is beginning to look his age.

It is traditional to begin the Pelé story on the streets of Bauru, where the boy then known as Edson Arantes do Nascimento was an indifferent school student obsessed with football. He was the son of a footballer - João Ramos do Nascimento, known by his nickname Dondinho - whose career had been cut short by injury. Dondinho spent hours putting Pelé through football drills, to the boy's delight and his mother's despair. "The amazing thing is all these years later I still can't separate my love for soccer from my love for him," Pelé says in his most recent memoir, Why Soccer Matters, written with Brian Winter.

"All these years later I still can't separate my love for soccer from my love for [my father]": Pelé.Credit:Simon Emmett/trunkarchive.com/Snapper Media

The family was poor to the point of being hungry. Pelé earned a little extra shining shoes at the train station. Though shorter and slighter than his classmates, even then Pelé was a better footballer than them: Dondinho had taught him to dribble close and strike with both feet, and his head. He often played in goal in street games to even out the teams.

In 1950, Brazil lost the World Cup at home to its tiny neighbour, Uruguay. In the gigantic Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, 200,000 fans wept. Outside it, an angry mob tore down the statue the hubristic mayor had raised of himself and tossed its decapitated head into a river. In Bauru, Dondinho listened to the game on the family's radio and was also reduced to tears. "Don't worry, Dad," Pelé recounts saying to him in the memoir. "One day I promise I'll win the World Cup for you." The radio and the shoeshine box can now be found in the Pelé Museum.

Trophy family: With his first wife, Rosemeri, and daughter Kelly Christina, in the late 1960s.Credit:Getty Images

The next Pelé folk tale normally told describes his move from Bauru to Santos at the age of 15. Depending on which version you hear, Pelé is wearing his first long trousers either sewn by his mother or bought by pooling family funds. Either on the train from Bauru to São Paulo, or the bus from São Paulo to Santos, Dondinho sleeps on the seat behind Pelé, while his local coach whispers advice: avoid women, the press and cigarettes, he is told. He has never smoked since.

Even before he played his first professional game, Pelé's fame was seeded in Santos. Crowds swelled at training sessions as word of the tiny country boy's talent got out. In team photos taken at that time, Pelé, who weighed about 55 kilos, looks like a mascot. Just 20 months later he was in the Brazilian national team at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden.

We are the champions: Hoisting the North American Soccer League trophy aloft with New York Cosmos in 1977.Credit:Corbis

Before the final, in which Brazil played the host nation, Pelé had become the star of the tournament, scoring a hat trick in a single half against France. His performance against the Swedes in the final left opponents stunned and the world captivated. For his second goal during that game he catches a long pass on his chest, drops the ball to his feet, bounces it once on a toe and lobs it over a defender into the net. The Swedish player Sigvard Parling later admitted, "When Pelé scored the fifth goal in that final, I have to be honest and say I felt like applauding." Pelé says the play was straight from the street games of Bauru.

Comparing him to another footballing great, the Argentinian goalkeeper Rogelio Domininguez said of him, "The difference between Pelé and [Afredo] Di Stefano is that Di Stefano knows everything and Pelé invented everything." (This was a particular horror for his opponents; as soon as they learnt one of his tricks he would invent another, on the spot. Pelé recalls in an earlier autobiography, My Life and the Beautiful Game, that in an exhibition match before packed stands in Senegal, the goalkeeper began crying and walked off after Pelé scored his second goal.)

Superstars: Pelé with David Beckham at a football function in New York City in 2008.Credit:Getty Images

As Pelé flew home from Sweden to a hero's welcome, Paris Match magazine declared him to be the King of Football and the name stuck, particularly in Brazil.

In one of the most moving passages of the book he wrote with Winter, Pelé describes his return to Bauru in 1958. The team had already been feted in parades in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Santos, but Pelé was most excited to see his hometown. As the aeroplane landed, police held crowds back and his parents stood proudly in the background. He was paraded down the main street under a banner that read: "Welcome to Pelé, son of Bauru, champion of the world."

Though still a boy at 17, Pelé was now The King and his life would never be the same.

Even the grainiest footage of those early years is thrilling. Defenders look as though they have been placed on the field only to highlight Pelé's feats. He seems immune to the logic of biomechanics and physics. A telling feature of his assaults on goal is the reaction of the defenders. After he scores they stand there looking back into the penalty area with slumped shoulders, appearing as much bewildered as beaten. A moment ago he was charging downfield at them, now he is leaping in celebration - what happened in between makes no sense.

"When he stopped, his opponents got lost in the labyrinths his legs embroidered," wrote Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano in his book, Football in Sun and Shadow. "When he jumped, he climbed into the air as if there were a staircase. When he executed a free kick, his opponents in the wall wanted to turn around and face the net, so as not to miss the goal."

Over the years he was to win two more World Cups - a record that stands today - and play for 18 years with Santos, a club that for a time became the best on earth. Later, he came out of semi-retirement for a stint with the New York Cosmos.

Pelé's fame erupted when mass media was in its infancy and, grounded as it was in football, it spanned nations and cultures. On an early Santos tour to Italy he was forced to run and hide from a mob of fans in a shopping centre as a team car was dispatched to rescue him, an episode that pre-dated Beatlemania. During his honeymoon in Rome in 1966, Pope Paul VI requested an audience with him and his new wife, Rosemeri. According to Pelé folk history, in 1968 antagonists in the Nigerian civil war declared a two-day ceasefire so they could watch him play during a visit.

As the global concept of celebrity grew, it was conferred on movie and music stars, on heads of state and political leaders. For them, fame mostly came and went. For Pelé, fame stayed, carefully tended.

On the second floor of the Pelé Museum in Santos, curators try to capture this with an exhibition of photos of famous people looking dazzled by Pelé. All the US presidents going back to Richard Nixon are there. (Later, Winter tells me that in the Nixon tapes - the secret recordings the president made of conversations in the Oval Office later used as evidence against him - Nixon sounds like an excited schoolboy on meeting Pelé.)

There are photos of Pelé with the Queen, who was to make him an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1997. There is a shot of Bobby Kennedy in a natty charcoal suit meeting Pelé in change rooms; Pelé is naked from the waist up, but for soap from his shower. There is a shot of him with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Brooke Shields, though famous images of him hanging out at Studio 54 with Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol during his New York years are not included, nor the one of him at Michael Jackson's 18th birthday party.

Though he didn't even finish high school until after retirement, Pelé was one of the first celebrities to understand how readily fame could be translated into currency. In 1961, the Swedish company Tetra Pak contacted him and explained they wanted him to "endorse" their product. He had never heard the term, and in Winter's book he describes discussing it with a sceptical Dondinho.

"What is it they want you to do?"

"They'll pay me to say I like their product."

The celebrity endorsement was born and soon Pelé had to hire staff just to keep track of the contracts.

He became, infamously, the first athlete to trademark his name. In the coming years he endorsed countless products, everything from Pepsi to Viagra. He appeared in movies and on soap operas. He recorded children's albums. (Showing me the gold and platinum albums, my guide at the Pelé Museum suggests it is best that I have not heard them.) Even that beautiful signature of his, with the outsized loop of the P ballooning over the lower case letters, looks as though it was created by a design team.

Despite his indefatigable exploitation of his own image, Pelé did not make himself rich during his playing years. Twice he lost his fortune, both times as a result of trusting close friends to manage his business interests as he focused on football. In part, this explains his move to New York in 1975 to play for the Cosmos, earning him nearly $US3 million over two years. By comparison the average major league baseballer was paid about $75,000 a season at that time.

The move ruffled feathers in Brazil and he was to provoke outright hostility almost 20 years later when he backed the USA's successful bid to host the World Cup in 1994. Pelé says he did not believe Brazil was economically or politically ready to host the competition at the time, and as a football evangelist he wanted to see the sport take root in the US.

To some, Pelé's endless commercial engagements were unseemly, especially as he often declared that his talent was a gift from God that conferred upon him the responsibility to bring people joy. Eduardo Galeano, who had written so beautifully of Pelé's grace in the game, added acidly that "off field he never gave a minute of his time, and a coin never fell from his pocket".

This is not strictly fair. In the years since his retirement, Pelé has volunteered his time as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador and for UNICEF. From 1995 to 1998 he served as Brazil's Extraordinary Minister for Sport, introducing legislation that sought to crack down on corruption in football. As is the way of sport and politics in his home country, the measures failed and in the end his legacy was tainted by a corruption scandal in his own ministry, though there was never any suggestion Pelé had committed any wrongdoing.

His image took a further beating when he fought for years to avoid DNA tests to establish paternity of Sandra Machado, a daughter born after an affair with a housemaid; even after her death from cancer in 2006 he refused to acknowledge her or her children. Pelé tells me he simply wanted to be sure she was his child. It is a response that flies in the face of the public record.

It is hard to concentrate at the centre of the Pelé circus. When Pelé arrives in the Santos locker room, it suddenly fills. With him are three members of his new management team, Legends 10, as well as his personal assistant. There are members of Santos's administration staff and other staffers who have slipped in to watch. There is his driver and security.

When I broach more recent controversies he does not flinch, though one of the Legends 10 team makes a furious wind-up gesture, whirling her finger by her head. Later she will sit next to me whispering a countdown in my ear as I try to ask questions.

As Brazil prepared for this year's World Cup, angry citizens - perhaps spurred by the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring - began to protest at the river of money being redirected from crumbling social services into stadium construction.

The government responded with a vicious crackdown. Rallies were met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Many protesters expected Pelé's support - he was, after all, an Afro-Brazilian descendant of slaves raised in poverty. But his position was conflicted at best.

"It's clear that politically speaking, the money spent to build the stadiums was a lot, and in some cases was more than it should have been," he said during a lecture. "Some of this money could have been invested in schools, in hospitals ... Brazil needs it. On that point, I agree [with the protests]. But I lament what protesters are doing, which is breaking and burning everything. It's money that we will have to spend again."

A banner appeared on the street declaring him to be the "traitor of the century" and Romário, the former football star turned popular socialist politician, declared that he was a "poet when he doesn't speak", later adding that, "Aside from a poet, he's also an imbecile."

Pelé tells me he simply believed the national team should be supported whatever the political situation.

Some found his championing of the purity of the game hard to swallow, given that he was marketing diamonds made out of his hair. He says he now realises that in Brazil, football and politics cannot be disentangled.

In the end, Brazil did not even make the final, losing the semi-final in a humiliating 7-1 thrashing to Germany. Pelé says he was glad not to be a member of either the team that lost to Uruguay in 1950 when he was a child or the current national squad.

In fact, Pelé was strangely absent from much of this year's World Cup, prompting speculation he had been shunned due to the bad publicity he had attracted. He was not at the opening ceremony, nor was he invited to present the trophy after the final.

His new management company, Legends 10, says the speculation is simply wrong, telling Good Weekend in a statement that Pelé chose to watch the opening match at home with his family and noting that he was present at many sponsors' events as well as the final "where most fans in the stadium sang 'Mil gols' in his honour and gave him a standing ovation".

Winter believes that he will begin to withdraw from public life after the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Until then, his deal with Legends 10 will keep him busy.

The company was formed in 2012 to manage and exploit the Pelé brand through the world's two biggest sporting events. "For the first time in 40 years, sponsors, brand managers and others seeking access to world soccer legend Pelé will be able to do so through a single agency" it announced in a statement. "The newly incorporated Legends 10 ... will be the exclusive agency empowered to represent Pelé globally with respect to all new branding, endorsement and product licensing agreements as well as appearances."

Pelé's relationship with Legends 10 has been characterised to Good Weekend as that of an employee, albeit a well-rewarded one. Having sold the rights to his image and its marketing, he is now contracted to make a set number of appearances. Legends 10 says he does between 50 and 70 events a year and so far in 2014 he has visited 14 countries, and he will soon appear in Australia under the arrangement. One observer recalls seeing him finish a round of media engagements only to be handed a stack of football jumpers to sign: "He looked miserable."

Asked why he thinks Pelé made the deal, Winter says he believes there is more to it than cash. Pelé has lived this life since he was 15 and knows nothing else. "He told me once that he has a nightmare where he walks into a room and nobody recognises him." And Pelé remains faithful to his fans. He does not turn down requests for autographs and photos.

I ask him if it is hard work being Pelé. He doesn't answer the question directly, instead saying the nickname is a gift from God, separating the two sides of his character, the public figure and the private man, Edson. He speaks of both in the third person.

When we finish he stands to leave but another man - an American who, like me, has made a long flight for a brief meeting - rushes forward and thrusts a football into his hand. "Could you sign this to Henry Kissinger?" he says. Pelé looks bewildered. A Legends 10 manager steps forward to explain to the football star that he is to be presented a leadership award by a US business group later in the year, but he will not be able to attend due to a diary conflict. Kissinger will be in the audience. Pelé sits and with great care starts on the autograph. Nixon's former secretary of state is, after all, a mad football fan and an old friend. He helped broker the deal with the Cosmos.

Half an hour later, Pelé is ready to leave the club with his own staff. A driver in an old Nissan waits two paces away from a side door in the narrow street. Pelé makes one step before shouts ring out: "Pelé! Pelé!" Windows in neighbouring apartments fly open. Cars pull over.

Pelé's Nissan gets halfway through a three-point turn before the driver gives up. Pelé gets out and opens his arms. A family group tumbles out of a car and runs stunned into his embrace as camera phones whir.

A minute later he is gone and they laugh and clap, then hug. Then cry.

For details of Pelé's appearances in Melbourne and Sydney on November 19-20, go to pelelive.com.au.